Michael Keith (born 1955) is an American mathematician, software engineer, and author of works of
constrained writing.
Keith was employed at
Sarnoff Corporation from 1980 until 1990 and
Intel Corporation
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 series ...
from 1990 to 1998, both tenures involving work in multimedia software. He was part of the original team at Sarnoff that developed
Digital Video Interactive, the first PC digital video system, and at Intel he was a member of the group that developed
Indeo, another video compression standard. As a result of this work Keith is credited as
inventor
An invention is a unique or novel device, method, composition, idea or process. An invention may be an improvement upon a machine, product, or process for increasing efficiency or lowering cost. It may also be an entirely new concept. If an ...
or co-inventor on 60
US patents. he works as a software designer, developer, and tester.
Keith was the first to describe
primeval numbers and
Keith numbers. His self-published book ''From Polychords to Pólya: Adventures in Musical Combinatorics'' is about the application of the
Pólya enumeration theorem to the counting and classification of musical constructs such as chords, scales, and rhythms.
Keith has written several long works of
constrained writing, such as ''
Cadaeic Cadenza
"Cadaeic Cadenza" is a 1996 short story by Mike Keith. It is an example of constrained writing, a story with restrictions on how it can be written. It is also one of the most prodigious examples of piphilology, being written in " pilish". Th ...
'', a story in which the number of letters in successive words spells out the first 3835 digits of the number
pi; the book ''Not A Wake: A Dream Embodying π's Digits Fully for 10000 Decimals'', which similarly encodes the first 10,000 digits of pi with texts composed in various literary styles;
and the book ''The Anagrammed Bible: Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon'', co-written with Richard Brodie, in which the roughly 95,000 letters of the original text are rearranged into a modern paraphrase. His constrained writing and articles on logology are a regular feature of ''
Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics''.
References
External links
*
14 197 and other Keith numbers Numberphile with
Brady Haran
{{DEFAULTSORT:Keith, Mike
20th-century American mathematicians
21st-century American mathematicians
1955 births
Living people
Intel people
Place of birth missing (living people)
American inventors